In Sarala Mahabharata, Kunti and Gandhari never had an easy
relationship. It was bound to be so. Kunti wanted her eldest son, Yudhisthira, to
inherit the throne of Hastinapura whereas her elder sister-in-law, Gandhari,
wanted her eldest son, Duryodhana, to be the king. But neither encouraged her
children to be hostile to their cousins; in fact, on occasions, Gandhari harshly
scolded Duryodhana for his hostility towards the Pandavas, as Kunti did Bhima,
equally harshly. After the wax palace fire happened, in which the Pandavas and
Kunti were believed to have perished, Duryodhana was enthroned as the king of Hastinapura.
Kunti seemed to have more or less resigned to that situation. But after her
daughter-in-law Draupadi’s humiliation in the Kaurava court and her sons’
(Madri’s sons were her sons too. She never differentiated between her sons,
Yudhisthira, Bhima and Arjuna and Madri’s sons, Nakula and Sahadeva) exile in
the forest for twelve years and their one year and thirteen days’ humiliating
stay, incognito, in the kingdom of Matsya in the service of king Virata, Kunti
bayed for revenge. She wanted complete extermination of the Kaurava brothers. Before
Krishna went to Duryodhana as Yudhisthira’s emissary of peace, he met her and she
asked him to give her his solemn word that he would work for war, instead of
peace, and she told him to ensure that war took place between the Pandavas and
the Kauravas. When the Great War was going on, she often reproached her sons
for not being able to kill the Kauravas, even after so many days of the fight.
Once she went to the extent of abusing even Krishna on this account! Her
language was so venomous and insulting that Bhima got infuriated and was almost
going to hit her but Krishna saved the situation for both. When the war was
over, like the Pandavas, Draupadi and Subhadra, she too claimed that the
victory was solely due to her.
She was there when the issue was
resolved. The severed head of Belalasena told them what he had witnessed with
regard to the killings during the Great War.
After the Belalasena episode, she
virtually disappeared from the narrative. She returned to it when Dhritarashtra
and Gandhari were going to leave the palace for their vanaprastha. In between terrible
things had happened: Gandhari had tried to
destroy the unsuspecting Yudhisthira with her yogic power and Dhritarashtra had
tried to kill the unsuspecting Bhima with his physical power. Both had failed
because of Krishna’s intervention. Instead of reducing Yudhisthira to ashes,
she had reduced her only surviving son Durdaksha to ashes. In profound grief
and frustration, Gandhari had cursed Krishna for the killing of her sons. She had
held him responsible for the war. He could have stopped it had he so wished,
she had told him. She had cursed him that his entire family would be destroyed
thirty-six years from then. The Avatara had accepted the curse of the bereaved
and helpless mother. The narrative does not say anything about Kunti’s
reactions to any of these.
Neither does it say anything
about her response to the killing of Abhimanyu’s son in his mother Uttara’s
womb, the subsequent restoration to life of the unborn dead by the Avatara and
Uttara’s death. Incidentally, this killing, which deeply pained the Pandava
family, was not directly related to the doings of Kauravas’ family.
Despite the uneasy relationship
that she had with Gandhari, when Dhritarashtra and Gandhari left for their
vanaprastha, Kunti surprised everyone by saying that she too would go on
vanaprastha with them. Her reasons in Sarala’s retelling are different from the
same in Vyasa’s Mahabharata. In Sarala Mahabharata, when Yudhisthira
asked her why she was deserting them, she said that she would not be happy in
the palace when Gandhari would live in hardship and sorrow in the forest.
Yudhisthira asked her whether Gandhari was living in sorrow when she was living
in misery in the forest. Kunti told her son that it would not be right to think
in such terms about her, the unfortunate mother, who had given birth to a hundred
sons and had lost them all. Yudhisthira told her that throughout her life she
had undergone great suffering in order to bring the five of them up all alone
and now by leaving for the forest, she was depriving them of the opportunity to
serve her and was thereby leaving them with a huge burden of debt towards her.
Kunti took him aside and told him that she had to go to the forest; it was
absolutely imperative on her part. Both blind, Dhritarashtra and Gandhari would,
in the forest, face all kinds of difficulties and each time they would, they
would curse him. She told Yudhisthira that she would serve them well and by
doing so, would protect him.
Earlier, when Gandhari had come
to know that Kunti was joining them, she had asked her with concern and
affection, why she was leaving her sons in the time of prosperity and opting
for a life of deprivation. What she told her sister-in-law shocked Yudhisthira.
She said that she had been living in great sorrow in the palace. She had sleepless
nights thinking of her son Karna, who, she knew, had suffered humiliation on
her account throughout his life. He was a celebrated warrior and a very
virtuous person. She condemned Arjuna as a sinner – “papistha ”– for
taking advantage of his unfortunate situation in the battlefield and killing
him (Ashramika Parva: 2544). She told
Gandhari that she had lost Ghatotkacha, Abhimanyu and many others who were her
own and she had had no peace. None in
the family knew about her suffering; she hadn’t shared her grief with anyone –
she had alienated herself from her own. Deeply upset, Yudhisthira told her how
she had been responsible for the war: how she had desperately wanted war and
how she had made Krishna promise her that the war took place. Kunti cut him short
and told him that it was pointless to think of those things at that moment. She
also told him that parents could not live with their children for ever.
What Kunti did can be viewed as
an exemplary moral act. She voluntarily chose a life of privation and suffering
over a life of comfort and that too at her old age. And she chose to do so to serve her elder
brother-in-law and sister-in-law, who did not ask for her help and did not
expect her to help them. Kunti knew that she could be extremely useful to them.
It is true that Dhritarashtra and Gandhari were not going to be alone in the
forest and that Vidura and Sanjaya would be with them, who had served him well
for years. One might surmise that she might have thought that despite that, she
would be of service to them, in other ways than Vidura’s and Sanjaya’s. The
text does not say anything explicitly in this regard but isn’t suggestiveness a
basic feature of poetic expression?
There is no reason to suspect
that she was not sincere about what she told Gandhari by way of explaining to
her why she had opted for being with them. The devastating war had levelled
both the victors and the vanquished – they had all become losers. The war had
ended their life-long uneasy relationship.
As Kunti had told Yudhisthira,
there were three of them in the Kuru family: Gandhari, Madri and she herself.
With Madri gone in the service of her husband (se swami karjya kala se
punyamani – literally, she did her husband’s work; she was a virtuous
person. “Her husband’s work” can be understood as “she did what pleased her
husband”) (Ashramika Parva: 2544),
only they two were left, suggesting that she did not want to be separated from
her from then on. Besides, with Dhritarashtra, Gandhari, Vidura and Sanjaya leaving
Hastinapura, there would be no one from her generation in Hastinapura. For
years, she had looked after her children (she had never treated Madri’s
children differently from her on, as already mentioned) but had not shared her
hurts and feelings with any of them. If she did with anyone, it was Krishna. And
the Avatara had left the mortal world. In view of all these, it is not
implausible to think that she wanted to spend her last days with those of her
generation.
Viewed thus, it would appear that
her decision to serve Dhritarashtra and Gandhari was not entirely altruistic,
not entirely out of her sense of duty. What Kunti had told Yudhisthira in
confidence reinforces this perspective, namely that the real reason for her to
be with Dhritarashtra and Gandhari during their vanaprastha was to protect him
from their curses. The quintessential mother, she had felt that she had still
to take care of her children, who needed that care from her and she could do so
by not staying with them. In sum, was her act of self-sacrifice truly virtuous,
untainted by self-interest?
Think again, if you have a doubt. Hers was a “self-centric
selfless” – the oxymoron best expresses it- act in the sense that she did not do it for
glory or fame or anything to do with the satisfaction of her ego or of the hope
for a blessed life in the abode of the immortals after her death or a happier
life in her next birth. When the mother acts to protect her children, this
natural act is virtuous by definition. Hers was a moral act and a truly
impeccable one at that.
In this sad story of two mothers,
one mother could not protect her children and was a helpless spectator to their
destruction. But if she could not save her children, she had tried to avenge
their killing. It was a motherly act, however heinous, disgusting and
despicable – and that’s because she had resorted to mean treachery. The other
mother chose to live a life of deprivation and suffering in the forest, trying
to protect her children from possible curses from the mother who had lost her
children because of her children. Just imagine the life she must have lived in
the forest, in fear and anxiety, dreading the possible utterance of a curse from
the mother she had gone to serve.
To end the story, the war had not
ended in the battlefield of Kurukshetra. It took place, later, in the palace in
Hastinapura, where Gandhari and Dhritarashtra had tried to kill Yudhisthira and
Bhima. It was there in the forest as well in the form of fear and anxiety for
her sons in Kunti’s mind. The closure came when the forest fire consumed them
both.
